Budiak, Iur[ii] and Mikhail Iantsyn, illustrator; Antonina Pavlova, translator.

[SOVIET-UKRAINIAN CHILDREN’S BOOK – EXECUTED RENAISSANCE] Aist i liagushki [The stork and the frogs].

Kyiv: Izdatel'stvo "Kul'tura"; Gosizdatel’stvo “Kiev-pechat’”, 1929. Quarto (17.5 × 17.5cm). Original staple-stitched chromolithographed self-wrappers; 12 pp. Chromolithograph illustrations throughout. Professional restoration to spine and wrapper edges; wrappers somewhat rubbed; still about very good. Item #55706

A richly illustrated first edition (the second printing followed in 1930) of this Russian translation of a children’s book by the Ukrainian poet, writer, and journalist Iurii Budiak (born Hryhoriy Pokos; 1878–1942). A well-loved children’s author, whose work was translated into Belorussian, Russian, and Yiddish, Budiak’s children’s books tended to focus on nature and animal relations, including this tale about a group of frogs attacked by a stork, who is in turn chased away by a little boy. Born in a peasant family in the Poltava region, and forced to support himself with a variety of odd jobs to continue his studies, Budiak started publishing in 1895. He would go on to publish broadly in Ukrainian-language publications including Hromadska Dumka, Ukrainska Khata, Rada, and Selo among others. In the 1920s, Budiak was a member of Pluh (the Union of Peasant Writers of Ukraine), a Ukrainian literary group of self-described peasant writers who supported the Bolshevik Revolution. Despite their political orientation, many members of Pluh were subsequently persecuted for their perceived nationalism, including Budiak himself, who was first briefly arrested and held in prison in 1922/1924. He was arrested again in 1935 for his close ties with Serhiy Pylypenko, the leader of Pluh, who was executed for his “bourgeois-nationalism” in 1934, along with many other Ukrainian writers and intellectuals repressed in this period, later referred to as the “executed renaissance.” Budiak was sentenced to five years of penal labor in Karaganda, which he survived, only to perish on his return to occupied Kyiv during WWII. The illustrator of the volume, graphic artist, illustrator, and set designer Mikhail Iantsyn (1890–1942) was a graduate of the Stieglitz Academy of Art in St. Petersburg. Iantsyn seems to have entered children’s book illustration through partnering with his wife, Vera Vasil’eva, who was a prolific children’s book writer.

As of April 2026, KVK, OCLC show one copy of this work in North America.

Price: €800.00

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